Joel > Joel's Quotes

“People can't anticipate how much they'll miss the natural world until they are deprived of it. I have read about submarine crewmen who haunt the sonar room, listening to whale songs and colonies of snapping shrimp. Submarine captains dispense 'periscope liberty'- a chance to gaze at clouds and birds and coastlines and remind themselves that the natural world still exists. I once met a man who told me that after landing in Christchurch, New Zealand, after a winter at the South Pole research station, he and his companions spent a couple days just wandering around staring in awe at flowers and trees. At one point, one of them spotted a woman pushing a stroller. 'A baby!' he shouted, and they all rushed across the street to see. The woman turned the stroller and ran.”
― Mary Roach, Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void

“Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.”
― Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives

“My hands tend to be full enough dealing with people who hate me for _who_ I am. Concentrate too hard on the millions who hate you for _what_ you are and you're likely to turn into one of those unkempt, sloppy dressers who sag beneath the weight of the two hundred political buttons they wear pinned to their coats and knapsacks. I haven't got the slightest idea of how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.”
― David Sedaris, Naked

“I thought of a sign I had seen... another scary time, when I was two hundred feet up in a giant karri tree in South West Australia. At the point where the precarious spiral ladder grew even steeper and narrower to reach the fire-watch platform atop the tree, the sign said: 'Reassess Your Situation Now: Turn Back if You Are Not Comfortable'. Then, as now, that seemed like damn good advice.”
― Robert Michael Pyle, Mariposa Road: The First Butterfly Big Year

“I heard a young city boy ask an elderly Papago woman if, lacking a harvesting pole, one could ever collect fruit off the tall cacti by throwing rocks at the tops to knock the fruit down.

'NO!' Marquita replied with a strain of horror in her voice. 'The saguaros- they are Indians too. You don't EVER throw ANYTHING at them. If you hit them on the head with rocks you could kill them. You don't ever stick anything sharp into their skin either, or they will just dry up and die. You don't do anything to hurt them. They are Indians.”
― Gary Paul Nabhan, The Desert Smells Like Rain: A Naturalist in Papago Indian Country

“A Sonoran Desert village may receive five inches of rain one year and fifteen the next. A single storm may dump an inch and a half in the matter of an hour on one field and entirely skip another a few hours away. Dry spells lasting for months may be broken by a single torrential cloudburst, then resume again for several more months. Unseasonable storms, and droughts during the customary rainy seasons, are frequent enough to reduce patterns to chaos.

The Papago have become so finely tuned to this unpredictability that it shapes the way they speak of rain. It has also ingrained itself deeply in the structure of their language.

Linguist William Pilcher has observed that the Papago discuss events in terms of their probability of occurrence, avoiding any assumption that an event will happen for sure...

Since few Papago are willing to confirm that something will happen until it does, an element of surprise becomes part of almost everything. Nothing is ever really cut and dried. When rains do come, they're a gift, a windfall, a lucky break.”
― Gary Paul Nabhan, The Desert Smells Like Rain: A Naturalist in Papago Indian Country

“Okay. Morality in a nutshell. Don't hurt people if you can avoid it. Don't steal stuff unless you're starving or it's really, really important. Work hard. Pay your bills. Try to help others. Always double-check your math if there are explosives involved. If you screwed it up, you need to see it gets fixed. And don't eat anything that talks. If it doesn't fall under one of those categories, just do the best you can.”
― Ursula Vernon, Digger, Volume One

“Changing the subject is one of the most difficult arts to master, the key to almost all the others.”
― César Aira, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter

“She was only beginning to grasp the geometry lessons that had perplexed her in junior high, the revelation that the world was full of infinite planes that never intersect.”
― Laura Lippman, In a Strange City

“People can't hear anything except when it's nonsense. Then they hear every word. If you try to talk sense, they think you don't mean it, or don't know anything anyway, or it's not true, or it's against religion, or it's not what they are used to reading in the newspapers...”
― Katherine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools

“When you live in China as a foreigner, there are two critical moments of recognition. The first comes immediately upon arrival, when you are confronted with your own ignorance. Language, customs, history- all of it has to be learned, and the task seems impossible. Then, just as you begin to catch on, you realize that everybody else feels pretty much the same way. The place changes too fast; nobody in China has the luxury of being confident in his knowledge. Who shows a peasant how to find a factory job? How does a former Maoist learn to start a business? Who has the slightest clue how to run a car rental agency? Everything is figured out on the fly; the people are masters at improvisation. This is the second moment of recognition, and it's even more frightening than the first. Awareness of your own ignorance is a lonely feeling, but there's little consolation in sharing it with 1.3 billion neighbors”
― Peter Hessler, Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West

“When Chen Meizi had chosen her specialty, she didn't expect to find a job that matched her abilities; she expected to find new abilities that matched the available jobs.”
― Peter Hessler, Strange Stones: Dispatches from East and West

“My building was constructed in 1896, and the utilities reflect an odd design that has been jerry-rigged further with each renovation. If you want to understand the wiring and plumbing in my building, you have to understand its history, how it was renovated for each new generation of scientists. My head has a long history also, and that history explains complicated nerves like the trigeminal and the facial.”
― Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: a Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

“But why live in these environments at all? What possessed fish to get out of the water or live in the margins? Think of this: virtually every fish swimming in these 375-million-year-old streams was a predator of some kind. Some were up to sixteen feet long, almost twice the size of the largest Tiktaalik. The most common fish species we find alongside Tiktaalik is seven feet long and has a head as wide as a basketball. The teeth are barbs the size of railroad spikes. Would you want to swim in these ancient streams?”
― Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: a Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body

“In subtle ways, Professor Vaughn showed us how to pay the land its due respect. He was patient with us if we tied an inept half hitch or ran the jeep into quick mud, but he bristled if we complained too much about the heat, or the smell of the cattle tank we used for a bath, or joked sarcastically about the social life of some small town. At the university, he lectured with such precision and speed that two students often teamed up for note taking. But stopped out on some two-track road in Jornada del Muerto, he could chew on a shaft of grass for an hour, languidly exchanging philosophy with a local cowboy. The professor even adopted a slower, lulling speech pattern in the field, and used local phrases liberally.

Time moved slowly in the desert and we were expected to fall into that rhythm.”
― Michael Novacek, Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs

“Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pockets. But I found it would be too long; and the age of the great epics is past”
― G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

“Everyone complains about their children. I wonder, and not just to be argumentative: if children are such a pain in the ass, why have them?”
― Amara Lakhous, Dispute Over a Very Italian Piglet

“You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

“The horrible thing about all legal officials, even the best, about all judges, magistrates, barristers, detectives, and policeman, is not that they are wicked (some of them are good), not that they are stupid (several of them are quite intelligent), it is simply that they have got used to it. Strictly they do not see the prisoner in the dock; all they see is the usual man in the usual place. They do not see the awful court of judgment; they only see their own workshop.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“I can imagine no more successful and productive form of manufacture than that of making mountains out of molehills.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

“The perplexity of life arises from their being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them; what we call it's triviality is really the tag-ends of numberless tales; ordinary and unmeaning existence is like ten thousand thrilling detective stories mixed up with a spoon.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

“I believe in preaching to the converted; for I have generally found that the converted do not understand their own religion.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

“Lying in bed would be an altogether supreme experience if one only had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

“I should like men to have strong and rooted conceptions, but as for their lunch, let them have it sometimes in the garden, sometimes in bed, sometimes on the roof, sometimes in the top of a tree.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

“People always brag about their vices; it is when they begin to brag about their virtues that they become insufferable.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

“German soldiers look as if they despised you, but French soldiers as if they despised you and themselves even more that you.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

“Being a nation means standing up to your equals, whereas being an empire only means kicking your inferiors.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

“Americans... are the most idealistic people in the whole world. Their only danger is that the idealist can easily become the idolator.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

“How did people come to chant rude poems while pulling certain ropes or gathering certain fruit, and why did nobody do anything of the kind while producing any of the modern things? Why is a modern newspaper never printed by singing in chorus? Why do shopmen seldom, if ever, sing?

If reapers sing while reaping, why should not auditors sing while auditing and bankers while banking?”
― G.K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles

“We humans do not understand compassion. In each moment of our lives, we betray it. Aye, we know of its worth, yet in knowing we then attach to it a value, we guard the giving of it, believing it must be earned, T’lan Imass. Compassion is priceless in the truest sense of the word. It must be given freely. In abundance.”
― Steven Erikson, Memories of Ice